ZAIRE
CRACKS

And the Media Fights Mobutu’s War

Written in the fall of 1997. Some 4-5 million people¾minimum¾have
since died in the former Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo.

keith harmon snow

This is a slightly
modified version of a report submitted to EXTRA! in late summer 1997.
Editors of EXTRA! felt that the original article didn’t capture the
essence of the media reportage at the time. True or not true, the report was
assembled after massive research of western media reportage on Zaire and
Mobutu, and written at the height of the U.S. sponsored invasion of Zaire, but
it was produced with little insight into, or knowledge of, the unfolding U.S.
role at the time. Few people could have anticipated that the “rebellion” in
Zaire was really a massive U.S. covert operation in progress. In any case, the
article remains an apt reflection of media reportage on Mobutu’s Zaire, and a
telling forerunner on the media’s biases in reporting on the DR Congo today.

Eighteen years ago,

in “Zaire
Could be Very Rich, but Now it Faces Ruin,” (New York Times, 2/1/79),
John Darnton accurately wrote that Zaire was “on the brink of ruin,” that
looting “was not done by rebels but by Zairian soldiers,” that “the masses are
close to starvation”, and that President Mobutu was “an isolated figure,
unpopular at home, ignored by much of Africa, disparaged by the East, and
embarrassing to the West.” Darnton later cited Zaire’s prisons “among the worst
in Africa,” and refugees “interrogated” in “harsh conditions” often “accompanied
by beatings,” (NYT, 2/5/79).

Noting the
“natural resource potential” and the failure of huge “development” schemes, the
article is framed in service to neocolonial economic exploitation. Language and
assumptions are based on the imperatives of the West, and there is no mention,
for example, of high international banking profits, the banks behind the IMF,
the African Development Bank, the International Finance Corporation, the
Export-Import Bank, or arms sales enabled by lucrative IMF loans. Noting that
“Zaire’s slide into bankruptcy and economic chaos is not merely a product of
one man’s misrule,” the underlying truths are not examined. The destitution and
chaos in Zaire was then, as today, relegated to the inevitable background of
the “Third World”. This is Africa, after all, and the media consistently
manipulates the realities to prove it.

Darnton
further ignored¾a.k.a.
he never reported on¾the
resignation of U.S. Embassy officer Robert Remole, who revealed in testimony
before the U.S. Congress Subcommittee on Africa (3/5/80) that he was prevented
from filing reports about Zaire, even to the Human Rights Division of the U.S.
State Department, unless they concerned incidents that had already been
reported in the press. According to Human Rights Watch, Remole’s experience was
not unique.

Steven
Greenhouse (NYT, 5/23-24/88) found “rampant corruption,” “capital
flight,” “arbitrary harassment, physical mistreatment and detention of ordinary
citizens,” though “Zaire won praise for trying to put its economic house in
order.” Quoting unnamed Western sources, Greenhouse revealed his contempt for
Zaire and his favor for Washington in saying “the political repression is
nothing compared with the economic incompetence.” The propensity to downplay
repression is a common theme however.

At a political
rally on January 17, 1988, Mobutu’s elite shock troops, the Military Action and
Intelligence Service (SARM), indiscriminately attacked thousands of people.
Eyewitness testimony taken by the Lawyer’s Committee for Human Rights noted
that plain clothes “security forces attacked at random, using clubs and
batons,” and uniformed forces “used live ammunition.” A handful of people died
on the spot; 500 were arrested and detained. The attacks were not reported at the
time, and they were not mentioned in the Greenhouse articles in May.

While ignoring
or marginalizing blatant state repression, the media instead manufactured
evidence designed to mislead. On April 19, 1988, Zairian security forces
attacked 30 women, and this incident and others like it were ignored or
forgotten in major press articles on Zaire.

“A dozen women
stood on [Kinshasa’s] main boulevard recently,” wrote Stephen Greenhouse (NYT,
5/23/88), instead, in a later article that serves to obscure the legitimate
protest and attacks, “handing out leaflets criticizing the Government of
President Mobutu until security police arrested them minutes later.”

Treated as an
isolated though “extraordinary event in Kinshasa, because Zairians rarely have
the courage to stand up to their leader,” Greenhouse entirely ignored and
thereby obscured the previous, and much more significant, women’s protest.

“Coffee
workers marching in the May Day parade in Goma, Zaire,” reads the caption of a
then Greenhouse photograph. “Sign praises President Mobutu.” There was no
mention of the April 19 attack.

Like the
exemplary courage of these elderly women, who faced daily starvation and
disenfranchisement by design, the April protest was neither unusual in its
realities nor in the U.S. media’s dismissal of it. Contrary to the Greenhouse
photo of smiling marchers praising Mobutu, the women in the more significant
protest that went unreported carried placards of Patrice Lumumba, the people’s
martyr, “mysteriously assassinated in 1961,” (NYT, 9/18/96), in a now
well-documented manhunt orchestrated by the CIA.

Marching from
U.S. to Belgian and French Embassies, the women were beaten by Mobutu’s Garde
Civile, forced into the trunks of cars, interrogated, tortured, and banished to
the Zairian bush. Witnesses said “the women were old; some about 70. When they
beat them the women said ‘we have lived long enough, we protest because we have
to.’ They (women) took off all their clothes, symbolizing that the women bear
the children.”

On February
23, 1990, women intent on demonstrating “that it was not only the men who were
pressing the government for reforms,” were harassed by the elite civilian
intelligence service, the Agence National de Documentation (AND). After security forces stripped
and brutalized one of some 80 women marching with placards and banners
demanding release of political prisoners and opposition party freedoms, other
women began to undress in solidarity. Security forces broke up the
demonstration and arrested approximately 60 women, with eight babies. This
women’s protest and the subsequent repression went unreported.

In
contemporary reportage, details and facts necessary for an accurate
comprehension of Zairian events are similarly obscured, manipulated, or
stripped of meaningful context, creating aberrant portraits of civil society,
military oppression, or foreign relations. Paramount is the media’s obfuscation
of Mobutuism, his cronies and shock-troops, and the grotesque neocolonial and
fascist entity otherwise recognized and legitimized as the Zairian “state.”

In “Economic
Collapse Withers Lush Zaire,” (Washington Post, 3/31/92), Keith Richburg
reported “monumental official corruption” and rioting “which touched off angry
army troops who had not been paid in months,” an article which completely
displaces the context. The masses were agitating for a legitimate transition to
democracy¾not
the imperialist U.S. model then being imposed¾but systemic collapse orchestrated by
the regime is attributed to an enigmatic people who, as subtitled, “display a
limitless capacity for suffering.”

Richburg
employed additional themes often carried into the present. “The situation
defies logic,” he quoted one unnamed Western expatriate, without question a
“vital cog in the economy,” to say, though “it’s difficult to pinpoint the
beginning of the current crisis.” The difficulty to attach blame goes without
saying, since an objective media would have no trouble following trails of
blood to the security apparatus supported by every U.S. president since
Eisenhower.

Noting that
“the cost of food is out of reach of most Zairians,” Richburg (Washington
Post, 3/31/92) wrote that “at least one Western diplomat has begun bringing
cookies and pastries to her office so her Zairian staffers can have something
to eat.” By implication the woman deserves a humanitarian award,
notwithstanding that it is her raison d’etre in Zaire that has most likely insured
the indignities¾starving
workers¾that confront her daily. Secure with
privileges of diplomatic and economic immunity, no doubt she should be
commended for her charity.

Zaire as
“enigma” persists, as does the timeless reportage. “What is sometimes difficult
to fathom, is how a society like the one that flourished” in Colonial days,
“could have fallen so far so fast,” (NYT, 2/14/97). The “breakdown” and
“chaotic independence” (NYT, 1/3/97) is “sudden” or “in recent days,” (NYT,
12/5/96), and there are plenty of fond memories from which to rewrite 36 years
of suffering by millions of unworthy victims. Zaire is a land “whose futures
have come and gone.” With its “mighty Congo,” its “broken clocks,” and its
mementos of the African Queen, even “to hear accounts of the series of
collapses, booms and uprisings... is almost dizzying,” (NYT, 2/14/97).

Perhaps more
dizzying would be media investigation of unfathomable terrorism exercised at
torture facilities run by security and intelligence forces, closed to
international inspection and the Zairian courts. (The media portrait of a
“tribal” Zaire excludes evidence that courts might, let alone do, operate.)
Similarly, U.S. propaganda campaigns launched by the Zairian Press Agency
(AZAP) or the Department of Citizen’s Rights and Liberties (DCRL) are ignored.
Created in 1986 and highly touted by Mobutu, the DCRL—Mobutu’s “human
rights” ministry—is never investigated.

Said the
Lawyer’s Committee for Human Rights, “[I]nstead of protecting the rights of
Zairians from abusive security forces, the DCRL has devoted its resources to
defending Zaire’s human rights record and promoting the Zairian government in
its dealings with international organizations and foreign governments.”

The media
consistently rehashes the specter of student massacres at Tiananmen Square
(6/89), where human rights abuses committed by a non-client government are ever
resurrected to manipulate public opinion, but comparable then-contemporary
massacres—if reported at all—retain the obscure and aberrant
frameworks in which they were initially and sporadically reported. As with the
Lagoon de Be’ massacre in Togo (April 1991), the Umeuchem (fall 1990) and Kaa
(fall 1993) incidents in oil-befouled Nigeria, and the Port Gentil massacre in
Gabon (May 23-31, 1990), the state perpetrated repression against students in
Zaire remained entirely off the record.

February 1989
saw massive premeditated repression against students in Kinshasa who had been
protesting the deteriorating economic conditions faced by university students.
Security forces (SARM) launched an offensive on February 14, 1989, with
helicopters and ground forces. Students and professors were attacked, detained
and tortured, with at least 14 students killed and some 40 students and
professors injured.

The attack on
students at the University of Lumumbashi came after student protests and arrests
in response to a Mobutu speech to the Zairian legislature on May 3, 1990. While
the campus was blockaded by security forces and the electricity cut-off by
governor’s order, commandoes of the Special Presidential Division (DSP)
reportedly flown in from Kinshasa raided the campus, attacking students with
knives and bayonets, pursuing them into dorms and dragging them out of their
beds. Estimated dead ranged from 12 to 150, but reports by Zairean nationals
have since estimated that perhaps more than 1000 students were killed. The
government’s version of events was falsified, and all independent
investigations were blocked. It has never received attention in the western
press.

In an
iconoclastic expose’ “Years of Corrupt Rule Drain Zaire’s Resources,” (Washington
Post, 3/24/97), James Rupert mentions “Camp Tshiatshi, the main base of the
Special Presidential Division,” (DSP) where “a billboard bears a smiling image
of Mobutu.” Exemplifying journalistic selectivity consistently employed by the
western press, this article mentions nothing of the terrorism of the DSP, the
existence and use of the underground torture centers at Camp Tshiatshi, or the
nearby “OAU2” torture center. Subtitled “Ingenuity is the Key to Survival,” the
article is an affront to the millions of people tortured, executed, imprisoned
without trial, raped¾or
the victims of starvation and disease¾over three decades, to focus on the
inevitable hardships of ingenious citizens like Citoyen (citizen) Crispin
Tshiwene and family. Thus is attention diverted by the media, for example, from
the internationally sanctioned state policies accelerating Zaire’s shift from
major food producer to net food importer, and onto the “inconveniences”
suffered by ordinary citizens or Western diplomats.

Indeed, “so concerned
with the survival of the regime and the expropriation of the countries
resources for private use,” wrote Mondonga Mokodi, that the government invented
a program of agricultural and rural development—based on conscription and
terrorism of the peasantry—to “mobilize rural people, indoctrinate them
with the ideology of the decadent Movement Populaire de la Revolution, and put an end to their organizations
and political actions.” While the benefit for Mobutuists has entailed
expropriation of capital and realization of enormous profits, he reported, “the
result for others has been repression, alienation, anger, diseases, illiteracy,
etc.”

Attention is
often shifted away from roots causes, and legitimate “news” is displaced by
dubious gossip, such as Mobutu’s cancer, ever resurrected to derail the
discussion which threatens Zaire’s benevolent keepers in the West: A people’s
revolution. The U.S. power base was not concerned about a change of leadership
in Zaire, but about threats to high finance and debt-service, arms sales,
minerals (diamonds, cobalt, columbo-tantalite, gold), oil, and timber
extraction. Hidden objectives of reportage are to silence the history of
exploitation, the history now in the making, and to preempt a popular
revolution. To do this, systematic propaganda is required. Fact is displaced by
fancy, specificity by speculation. The roots of the crises are never explored.

Critical to an
objective record is the Sovereign National Conference of 1991-1992, with its Committee
for Civil Society or Committee
for The Return of Ill-Gotten Gains,
where the Mobutu criminals secured one-for-one status with honest agents of the
people, where former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Herman Cohen worked to
insure that efforts to institute a people’s democracy were derailed.

“AFTER ME, THE DELUGE!”

Mild media
exposé’s cited above always serve more to shield Mobutu¾no matter the human cost of his
vicious, devious, corrupt, sadistic rule¾than to expose his fascist enterprise
to legitimate threats. His discredited agents, like former Prime Minister Kengo
wa Dondo, and, possibly, “opposition” leader Etienne Tshisekedi, are often
cited by the media. This legitimizes their roles in the unprecedented transfer
of wealth orchestrated from “Independence” to present day. Infrequently dubbed
a dictator or despot, rarely a tyrant, and never a fascist, Mobutu was
“leader,” “President” and “Guide.” Such titles of dignity distance Mobutuists
from their roles as destroyers, assassins, traitors, executioners and organized
criminals.

(Writer’s
note, April 23, 2004: Just as the title “president” legitimizes the organized
crime of the U.S. executive branch.)

“Since the
country’s independence from Belgium in 1960, Mr. Mobutu has repeatedly
demonstrated an extraordinary talent for political survival,” wrote Howard
French in the New York Times (11/8/96)¾the complete suffocation of civil
society aside. Inferring Mobutu’s immunity to that uniquely “African”
inferiority “measured” by eugenicists, French went on to say that “few would
dispute that in this part of the world his political instincts remain
unparalleled.” Likewise from Time (11/25/96), only “Mobutu’s will and
wizardry have held [Zaire] together for this long. His style of rule combines
charisma with a flair for draconian repression.”

Central to
media cult of Mobutu is the ubiquitous flair for chaos and “charisma” in the
regime’s deployment of shock¾troops integral to the security and intelligence apparatus
of the state. Troops serve up a perverse and bloody terror always attributed to
“unexplained chaos” or to “unhappy,” “ill¾paid” or “demoralized” soldiers (NYT,
2/24/97), as if this were by accident and not by design. Noting that the Mobutu
Government “had accused the [Tutsi] rebels of using drugged young people as human
shields,” (NYT, 1/24/97), Paul Lewis forgets that it was just such
tactics as these that secured the state “stability” (Washington Post,
10/26/96) ever trumpeted by the West.

In a variation
on the omnipotent Mobutu theme, James Rupert dubbed Mobutu’s illness “a key
element in Zaire’s civil war and political chaos,” (Washington Post,
3/24/97). Thus, even as his utility to the West evaporated, Mobutu was
described more favorably than not. He is “like an aged lion cornered by
hyenas,” wrote Howard French (NYT, 3/21/97). The image is touching, the
“King of Beasts” revered for its courage, strength and fearlessness, while
“hyenas”¾often depicted as cowardly, sniveling
and untrustworthy¾was
attached to Mobutu’s “opposition” and to “rebel” leader Laurent Kabila. Still,
Mobutu was “long the unchallenged master of the political game,” wrote French.

“Although many
have grown weary of his rule,” wrote Lynne Duke, (Washington Post,
12/19/96), with classic understatement, the “still frail” Mobutu “is widely
viewed as the sole figure able to rescue Zaire from the economic and military
drift that threatens.” Perhaps no theme was so consistently regurgitated over
36 years of Zaire’s “independence” as that of a “disintegration” in Mobutu’s
absence¾unlike that in his presence.

“Mobutu’s
great achievement is being able to keep” Zaire “from disintegrating,” (NYT,
12/15/86). “American and European diplomats say that although Mr. Mobutu has
his flaws, they are frightened to think what would happen if their countries
were to withdraw their support,” (NYT, 5/24/88). “Mobutu is an
absolutely critical dynamic in the situation,” (Christian Science Monitor,
8/23/95). “Indication’s are mounting that Africa’s second largest nation has
begun to implode,” (NYT, 12/5/96). Indeed, less Mobutu, “it’s going to
be chaos. People will fight each other to position themselves to take over,” (Washington
Post, 3/9/97).

THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE TELEVISED

The media
continues to destroy the complex contextual history of Zaire. The term “rebels”
was more often than not attached to Laurent Kabila and the Alliance of
Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Zaire (AFDL), and with classic Cold War
Red hysteria the media ever reinforced that Marxist Kabila was “once assisted
by Marxist Revolutionary Che Guevara,” (Chicago Tribune, 3/20/97). The
media fiction was that “the rebellion [1996-1997] began with Tutsi who have
lived in Zaire for centuries,” (NYT, 2/12/97), in a “limited uprising by
ethnic Tutsi,” (NYT, 3/25/97), who “took up arms in October,” (NYT,
3/18/97).

Tiny clips
first reporting the “new” violence declared that: “Rwandan Hutu refugees armed
with assault rifles and machetes hunted down hundreds of Tutsi,” (NYT,
5/17/96) and “slaughtered at least 12,” (L.A. Times, 5/17/96). Then came
“Stoked by Rwandans, Tribal Violence Spreads in Zaire,” (NYT, 6/16/96). Time
declared “A Contagion of Genocide,” (7/8/96), a noteworthy but shallow report
that misportrayed the victims and the killers. To the Washington Post it
soon became “Zaire’s Haven for Murderers,” (7/14/96).

August and
September 1996 saw spotty clips on “ethnic” and “tribal” fighting as the media
ignored the “new” crisis, which shortly claimed tens of thousands of lives,
until the Clinton reelection was secure (11/4/96). Late October saw a
full-blown propaganda campaign “trapping” some 220,000 refugees in a
“long-running feud” between “Zairian soldiers and local guerrillas,” (NYT,
10/22/96). Calling it “a communist movement of the 1960’s” newly “enflamed in
1993,” most framed the violence on “ethnic” hatreds “brewing since September,”
(Washington Post, 10/26/96). Tired of repackaging the old crisis, the
media finally reported a “popular uprising cutting across ethnic lines,” (NYT,
11/6/96). Reports consistently, but wrongly, continue to site the crisis as a
Tutsi uprising begun in October (NYT, 3/9/97).

In unison with
the U.S. Government’s rhetoric of hand-wringing amidst rising body counts ¾ or “watching helplessly as four
African nations head for the precipice,” (NYT, 11/2/96) ¾ the media consistently declared that
the U.N. was unable “to coax the refugees to return” to Rwanda “despite public
relations campaigns and other gentle persuasion,” (NYT, 10/28/96).
Forgotten was a report that verified that the Rwandan government was responsible
for massacres of returning refugees.

In “U.N. Stops
Returning Refugees,” (NYT, 9/28/94), Raymond Bonner reported that the
United Nations High Commission for Refugees had documented the new Rwandan
(RPF, Paul Kagame) Government’s “unmistakable pattern of killings and
persecution” of returning refugees. Written by USAID consultant Robert Gersony,
the report was later reportedly “discredited” by a team of U.N. experts, and,
subsequently it fell from view and disappeared forever. (The report was buried
because the Kagame government¾all “Tutsi survivors of genocide”¾was, and remains, a U.S. client
government responsible for massive human rights atrocities, crimes against
humanity and acts of genocide in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo,
formerly Zaire.)

But the
hostilities in Zaire’s Kivu region were no “contagion of genocide,” even if
legitimate refugees infiltrated by “genocidal” Hutu extremists did fan the
Zairian flames. On the other hand, they were clearly a “contagion of genocide”
in the framework whereby the Rwandan (RPF) and Ugandan (UPDF) forces
deliberately massacred hundreds of thousands of combatants and civilians
targeted as hostile to their immediate agenda: empire.

Deliberate and
systematic reprisals in Kivu began prior to 1985, when Mobutu ordered elite
“green berets” of the Forces Armee Zairois (FAZ) to indiscriminately terrorize the local population.
Forewarned by human rights groups, the media had sufficient capacity for
accurate reporting even as the conflict slid into the 1990’s. Like the massive
and transparent preparations for Rwanda’s “genocide” (1994), state terror in
Kivu was first ignored, and later manipulated.

Also obvious
is the media’s unequal treatment of combatants. While sometimes publicizing
massacres of Hutu refugees by AFDL forces (NYT, 11/30/96) “trying to
pull off a genocide of their own,” (NYT, 2/12/97)¾which they did¾atrocities committed by Zairian forces
received far less attention, though details of atrocities by both sides are
manipulated in service to the themes of chaos and tribe. Veiled by U.S.
newspaper and newsweekly blanket coverage of returning refugees (Oct.-Dec.)
were the numerous arbitrary and politically motivated arrests, tortures,
massacres and “disappearances” perpetrated by FAZ and AFDL forces.

Amnesty
International issued regular alerts noting the systematic and sustained
persecution of women, members of religious groups, and human rights defenders.
Unmentioned, for example, were the (Nov.-Dec.) rapes, kidnaps and murders at
the Lycee Likovi secondary school in Bunia, where FAZ troops “raped the young
girls savagely and systematically, leaving seven of them dead,” (Amnesty
International, 2/20/97). With classic institutional detachment and
superficial generality, the New York Times reported only that soldiers
“looted” and “destroyed homes” in Bunia, (“Zaire Forces Abandon Key Gold Town
to Rebels,” 12/11/96).

The “rebels”
are involved “in dangerous businesses, including smuggling gold, arms and other
contraband,” (NYT, 10/31/96), unlike Mobutuists. Indeed, “Central
Africa’s military messiah [Kabila] is accompanied by a bizarre band of
apostles,” who “never amounted to much more than a nuisance,” like “Mai-Mai
tribesman, who smoke marijuana, worship water, and festoon themselves with bathroom
fixtures, mainly faucets and hoses,” (Time, 3/24/97). Though Zairian
soldiers “dancing naked” were first linked to (read: irrational and immoral)
“Mai-Mai” (NYT, 11/2/96), these now permanent media fixtures are also
rebel “voodoo warriors who believe they are bulletproof,” (U.S. News &
World Report, 3/24/97).

Photos of
Kabila’s festooned “apostles” and voodoo warriors are never provided however.
Equally lacking are photos belying the bloody realities of war. There are no
photos of soldiers¾festooned
in fatigues or faucets¾in or returning from combat, in medical tents, body bags
or mass graves. With thousands of reports published since 1994, few photos
reveal any of the sophisticated military equipment in use. Nor does the media
reveal any trace of “modern civilization” in Central Africa¾but for a few photos framing the U.S.
troop heroics.

“The rebels
advanced from three sides with columns of tanks,” (Washington Post,
3/19/97). Yet such equipment is never seen and the articles hardly allude to
sophisticated weapons. (Worse still, the rebels were supported at the
deepest levels by the U.S. military.)
Meanwhile the images of hopelessness and destitution proliferate because this,
after all, is Zaire. Heart of darkness. And Zaire, or so the media would have
us believe, is uncivilized. It is a landscape of hopelessness. Of tribes and
savages and filthy refugees suffering from Ebola or the African condition. From
the “contagion of genocide,” from “The Coming Anarchy” (Atlantic Monthly,
2/94) and the stinking equatorial heat.

For further
discussion of the role of the west in the January 17, 1961 murder of Patrice
Lumumba, see: Lumumba: A Biography, Robin McKown, 1969; and The
Assasination of Lumumba, Ludo De Witte, Verso, 2001.